In similar fashion, NATO overreached by encouraging Ukraine to beat a path toward the alliance. The 2014 Maidan Revolution toppled a pro-Moscow regime and put Ukraine on a westward course, resulting in Russia’s intervention in Crimea and the Donbas. NATO’s open door beckoned, prompting Ukrainians in 2019 to enshrine their NATO aspirations in their constitution—a move that set off new alarm bells in the Kremlin. Given its proximity to Russia and the devastation caused by Moscow's further aggression, Ukraine would have been better off playing it safe, quietly building a stable democracy while sticking with the neutral status that it embraced when it exited the Soviet Union. Indeed, Ukraine’s potential return to neutrality has figured prominently in sporadic talks between Kyiv and Moscow to end the war.

NATO has wisely avoided direct involvement in the fighting in order to avert war with Russia. But the alliance’s unwillingness to militarily defend Ukraine has exposed a troubling disconnect between the organization’s stated goal of making the country a member and its judgment that protecting Ukraine is not worth the cost. In effect, the United States and its allies, even as they impose severe sanctions on Russia and send arms to Ukraine, have revealed that they do not deem the defense of the country to be a vital interest. But if that is the case, then why have NATO members wanted to extend to Ukraine a security guarantee that would obligate them to go to war in its defense?

NATO should extend security guarantees to countries that are of intrinsic strategic importance to the United States and its allies—it should not make countries strategically important by extending them such guarantees. In a world that is rapidly reverting to the logic of power politics, in which adversaries may regularly test U.S. commitments, NATO cannot afford to be profligate in handing out such guarantees. Strategic prudence requires distinguishing critical interests from lesser ones, and conducting statecraft accordingly.

STRATEGIC PRUDENCE also requires that the West prepare for the return of sustained militarized rivalry with Russia. In light of the tight partnership that has emerged between Moscow and Beijing—and China’s own geopolitical ambitions—the new Cold War that is taking shape may well pit the West against a Sino-Russian bloc stretching from the Western Pacific to Eastern Europe. Like the Cold War, a world of rival blocs could mean economic and geopolitical division. The severe impact of the sanctions imposed on Russia underscores the dark side of globalization, potentially driving home to both China and Western democracies that economic interdependence entails quite considerable risk. China could distance itself from global markets and financial systems, while the United States and Europe may choose to expand the pace and scope of efforts to decouple from Chinese investment, technology, and supply chains. The world may be entering a prolonged and costly era of de-globalization.

The return of a two-bloc world that plays by the rules of realpolitik means that the West will need to dial back its efforts to expand the liberal order, instead returning to a strategy of patient containment aimed at preserving geopolitical stability and avoiding great power war. A new strategic conservatism should seek to establish stable balances of power and credible deterrence in the European and Asia-Pacific theaters. The United States has a playbook for this world: the one that enabled it to prevail in the first Cold War.

What Washington does not have a stratagem for is navigating geopolitical division in a world that is far more interdependent than that of the Cold War. Even as it stands up to autocracies, the West will need to work across ideological dividing lines in order to tackle global challenges, including arresting climate change, preventing nuclear proliferation and pursuing arms control, overseeing international commerce, governing the cybersphere, managing migration, and promoting global health. Strategic pragmatism will need to temper ideological discord.

Washington also lacks a stratagem for operating in an era in which the West faces homegrown threats to liberal democracy that are at least as potent as the external threats posed by Russia and China. During the Cold War, the West was politically healthy; liberal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic enjoyed ideological moderation and centrism, buttressed by broadly shared prosperity. A steady and purposeful brand of U.S. grand strategy rested on a solid political foundation and enjoyed bipartisan support.

But the West today is politically unhealthy, and illiberal populism is alive and well on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the bipartisan compact behind U.S. statecraft has collapsed—as has the nation’s political center. Ideological moderation and centrism have given way to bitter polarization amid prolonged economic insecurity and gaping inequality. The war in Ukraine has not helped matters; Biden’s ambitious agenda for domestic renewal, already scaled back due to gridlock in Congress, suffered further as a result of Washington’s focus on the conflict. And high rates of inflation, fueled in part by the economic disruptions arising from the war, are stoking public discontent, likely costing Democrats control of Congress in the upcoming November midterms.

In Europe, the political center has broadly held. Mainstream center-left and center-right parties have lost ground to anti-establishment parties, but they have stayed ideologically centrist and, for the most part, remained in power. Yet illiberal populists continue to govern Hungary and Poland, and their fellow travelers wield political influence in most European Union (EU) member states. Indeed, Italy's centrist government collapsed in July and the hard right may well surge in approaching elections. The United Kingdom has engaged in a stunning act of self-isolation and self-harm by quitting the EU—London remains tangled up in uneasy negotiations with Brussels over the terms of Brexit. The economic damage wrought by inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, and potential energy shortages abetted by the West’s sanctions on Russia, may end up undermining the continent's political center and weakening European and transatlantic solidarity.

As the United States and its allies contemplate mounting tension with a Sino-Russian bloc, they must ensure that they continue to redress the West’s own internal vulnerabilities. It is true that during the Cold War, the discipline that the Soviet threat imposed on American politics helped mute partisan conflict over foreign policy. Similarly, the current prospect of a new era of militarized rivalry with Russia and China is reviving bipartisan cooperation on matters of statecraft.

This return to bipartisanship is, however, likely to be short-lived—just as it was after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans should not operate under the illusion that a more competitive international environment will of its own accord restore the country’s political health—especially amid the highest U.S. inflation rate in forty years. In similar fashion, even though Europe has demonstrated impressive unity and resolve during the war in Ukraine, it will undoubtedly face renewed political challenges as it copes with a huge influx of Ukrainian refugees and deals with additional economic burdens, including weaning itself off of Russian energy.

Both sides of the Atlantic thus have hard work to do if they are to get their own houses in order and reinvigorate the globe’s anchor of liberal order. Given the potential for the politics of grievance to make a comeback in the United States, the Biden administration urgently needs to continue advancing its domestic agenda. Investing in infrastructure, education, technology, health care, climate solutions, and other internal programs offers the best way to alleviate the electorate’s discontent and revive the country’s ailing political center. Europe’s agenda for renewal should include economic restructuring and investment, reform of immigration policy and border control, and more expenditure in and pooling of sovereignty on foreign and defense policy.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine heralds the return of a more realist world, requiring that the West’s idealist ambitions more regularly yield to cold strategic realities. Even though the war has certainly helped revive the West and its cohesion, the homegrown threats to liberal democracy that were front and center before the war still require urgent attention. It would be ironic if the West succeeds in turning Putin’s gamble in Ukraine into a resounding defeat, only to see liberal democracies then succumb to the enemy within.

Charles A. Kupchan is Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His most recent book is Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World.

Image: Reuters.